Telecommunications have greatly advanced over the years. No longer is a telephone simply a means of voice communications. Today, society views telecommunications as a technology that provides data communications, such as text messaging and e-mail services, and data network (e.g., the Internet) access. There are many other resources that are provided by telecommunications these days as telephones, both home and mobile, have become points of convergence for a variety of technologies and content distribution, where content includes text, video, and audio.
Advertisers of products and services have and will continue to pursue most effectively delivering their advertising messages to desired customers. Targeted advertising using technology has improved over the years, but limitations exist. Internet advertising faces challenges to identify potential customers who reside in locations that benefit advertisers, especially local advertisers. For example, a local advertiser who desires to advertise on the Internet to reach local customers find themselves advertising on a locally based website, on national recognized websites (e.g., Yahoo) that have local sections within the websites, and in search engines that deliver local, geographically based search results from a user performing a search (e.g., pizza Dallas Tex.). Other targeted advertising techniques on the Internet have been used, but as advertisers have found, delivering targeted advertising on the Internet is a significant challenge given that the Internet is a world-wide forum and local searches, for example, do not necessarily deliver the advertisements to potential local customers.